You’ve probably already heard of COBIT – it has been around for a while. If you have, then you might remember COBIT from its days of being an approach that was applicable to those with, shall we say, audit requirements. You might also remember COBIT’s longer name (as was) – “Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies” – which reinforced its audit-based roots. But it’s just plain-old COBIT now. Like ITIL, and the IT Infrastructure Library nomenclature, the acronym has superseded the longer-form name to reflect the evolved focus and scope of coverage. And if COBIT is potentially of interest to you, especially with the new COBIT 2019 recently replacing 2012’s COBIT 5, please read on for 10 tips on how best to start your COBIT journey.

Topics: ITSM, COBIT, ITIL

Continual service improvement (CSI) has unfortunately been a long-neglected area in IT service management (ITSM), sometimes viewed as the ultimate post-success undertaking (“We’ll get to that once all of the planned work has been completed” – which is shorthand for “never”). With the publication of ITIL Practitioner, CSI as crucial capability has become significantly more prominent, but the results could often be better. This blog explains why and what to do about it.

Topics: CSI, Continual service improvement, ITIL, ITSM

In my last ITSM 101 blog, I wrote about five ways people commonly misunderstand and misuse ITIL. From overly focusing on the processes, through expecting a new IT service management (ITSM) tool to fix everything, to running large projects (or programs) that take too long to start to deliver value. In this blog, I offer up five more common ITIL mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.

Topics: ITSM, ITIL, Service Desk

If you follow Twitter and read blogs about IT service management (ITSM), as I do, you will probably have read lots of complaints about ITIL. And yet most of the IT organizations that I work with use it as the basis for how they run IT, and it seems to work very well for them. So why are there so many complaints? Well, when I read the complaints, they almost always seem to be based on a distorted view of what ITIL is, or what it says you should do. So, before you complain too, think about my first five examples of ways that people misuse or misconstrue ITIL.

Topics: ITSM, ITIL, Service Desk, Request Management, enterprise service management

The major incident management process can be one of the most important IT service management (ITSM) processes for an organization. A major incident can hurt business operations (and thus revenues). And when a major incident is handled badly it reflects negatively on your organization and will likely increase customer inquiries and complaints. In addition, it can cause issues for your frontline staff because, at best, they face an increased workload and at worst, team morale is damaged. This blog offers 5 ways in which to improve major incident communications and thus minimize the impact major incidents have on all affected.

Topics: Incident Management, Major Incidents, ITIL

I suspect that most of my readers have heard of ITIL, the world’s most popular set of practices for IT service management. In fact, I’d guess that many of you have probably already tried to “implement” ITIL. Sadly, however, many of those who do try find that it isn’t as easy as they’d expected. If that’s the case, this blog is for you; I’m hoping to show you just how easy it can be to get started with ITIL, and how quickly it can lead to tangible benefits for you, for your colleagues, and for your customers.

Topics: ITIL, ITSM

Topics: business solutions, customer satisfaction, help desk, Information Technology Infrastructure Library, IT Management, IT management, IT management solution, ITIL, service desk, Service Desk Software

Topics: Customer Service Management, help desk, inventory asset management, inventory management, IT inventory, IT Management, IT management, ITIL, service desk, Service Desk Software